From Periplum to Map: Claude McKay’s Postwar Odyssey in Home to Harlem

Abstract

Claude McKay’s 1928 Home to Harlem depicts a Black man, Jake Brown, who deserts the Great War after serving in labor battalions but never in combat. The novel follows the tradition of the “nostos,” a tale of homecoming, usually from war, in the vein of Homer’s Odyssey. McKay’s novel joins Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos, both of which found in Odysseus a figure who spoke to the modern age. Pound’s concept of the “periplum” proves to be of particular use in articulating Jake’s dilemma once he returns to Harlem. As an eye-level description of a landscape that Odysseus experiences on his sea travels and that is recorded in the Cantos, the periplum expresses both the joy and the perils of immediate sensory experience. Jake tries to rise above the various temptations that keep him from finding his true Penelope, the nightclub singer Felice, whose address he loses on his second day home. In his struggle to find her, Jake must first acquire a transcendent cartographic perspective, which helps him to withstand not only Harlem’s many disorienting enticements, but also to understand his own place as a disenfranchised Black man on the national and world map.